You’re on Amazon.com. You’re buying, say, a toaster, and you’re checking out the customer reviews. You assume the people writing these reviews are people like you — people who wanted a toaster, went online and bought one. As it turns out, a lot of reviews on Amazon are written by people who are nothing like you. They’re written by elite reviewers who are sent free merchandise to review products. In other words, it’s possible that the guy reviewing that toaster you’re looking at wasn’t in the market for a toaster to begin with and didn’t pay a cent for it.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Amazon also fuels competition among reviewers by making their rankings public. And top reviewers do get a lot of free stuff.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

When their ranking depends on the kind of review they give, do you really think you’re going to get anything resembling an honest review?

You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor.

This was brutal:

When she left my VP turned to me and said, “did you see that tank top she had on under her blouse?! OMG, you wear a silk shell, not a tank top!”

State-owned channel Rossiya 24 even showed footage of a technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a “spy chip” with what he called “a little microphone”. Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks. Other products found to have rogue components reportedly included mobile phones and car dashboard cameras.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

I never expected this.

It would be easier to plant software like that in a tablet made in China.

They don’t cite the source, but 1Pad reports that Steve Wozniak wants an iPad with 256GBs of storage [Google English]. He cites the difficulty of finding good wireless connections. My own concern is that I will not use the Cloud after all the NSA spying revelations. When your data is in the Cloud, the Cloud provider can be served with a warrant to examine your stuff without you ever being notified. The hell with that. I want to be notified and the only way for that to be more likely to happen (it’s no longer guaranteed since they’re now regularly violating the Bill of Rights) is if I store everything on my own premises.